Russian senators will visit Cuba this week

A delegation of Russian senators, members of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly, was scheduled to arrive in Havana Saturday (April 19) for a week of meetings with top Cuban officials, according to Russia’s Parlamentskaya Gazyeta newsletter.

The Gazyeta did not say how many senators were in the delegation but said that they would be led by Vadim Albertovich Tulpanov (shown in photo above), chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Rules and Organization.

The Assembly is the upper house of the Russian Parliament. The lower house is the Duma.

The delegation is to meet with the vice president of the Council of Ministers, Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz; the chairman of the National Assembly, Esteban Lazo Hernández; the minister of Foreign Trade, Rodrigo Malmierca Díaz; the minister of Finance and Prices, Lina Pedraza Rodriguez, and the president of the Cuban Central Bank, Ernesto Medina Villaveirán. They will also tour Russian-Cuban engineering enterprises.

One of the senators’ key meeting, the Gazyeta says, will be with the minister of Tourism, Manuel Marrero Cruz. “It should be noted that, according to the [Russian] Foreign Ministry, more than 60,000 Russian tourists visited Cuba in 2013,” the newsletter says.

[Cuba puts that figure at 70,401 and places Russia ninth on the list of guest countries. Canada, Britain and Germany top the list, in that order.]

“The development of tourism infrastructure, which today is the most dynamic sector of the Cuban economy, is an important factor in [Cuba’s] political stability and job security. Tourism is also the most significant source of foreign exchange,” the newsletter points out.

The meeting at the Tourism ministry “will focus on the development of tourism exchange between the two countries,” the Gazyeta says.

Political discussions will also be on the Russians’ agenda. “Because of the coincidence or proximity of positions between Russia and Cuba on most key issues, the two countries have developed an active bilateral cooperation at the United Nations and other international forums,” the newsletter says.

The Gazyeta reminds readers that “Cuba actively supported Russia’s position on the Crimean issue and the situation in Ukraine, voting against the March 27 U.N. General Assembly resolution titled ‘The Territorial Integrity of Ukraine.'”

That resolution said that the Crimean referendum that led to the peninsula’s annexation by Russia had “no validity.”